E-Galley Review: Ever Cursed by Corey Ann Haydu

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Ever Cursed by Corey Ann Haydu
Published by Simon Pulse on July 28, 2020
Genres: YA Fairy Tale
Pages: 304
Source: the publisher
Format: E-galley
My Rating:
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Synopsis:

Damsel meets A Heart in a Body in the World in this incisive and lyrical feminist fairy tale about a princess determined to save her sisters from a curse, even if it means allying herself with the very witch who cast it.

The Princesses of Ever are beloved by the kingdom and their father, the King. They are cherished, admired.

Cursed.

Jane, Alice, Nora, Grace, and Eden carry the burden of being punished for a crime they did not commit, or even know about. They are each cursed to be Without one essential thing—the ability to eat, sleep, love, remember, or hope. And their mother, the Queen, is imprisoned, frozen in time in an unbreakable glass box.

But when Eden’s curse sets in on her thirteenth birthday, the princesses are given the opportunity to break the curse, preventing it from becoming a True Spell and dooming the princesses for life. To do this, they must confront the one who cast the spell—Reagan, a young witch who might not be the villain they thought—as well as the wickedness plaguing their own kingdom…and family.

Told through the eyes of Reagan and Jane—the witch and the bewitched—this insightful twist of a fairy tale explores power in a patriarchal kingdom not unlike our own.

My Review:

I’ve had a lot of trouble with fantasy and books like this recently, but this one I had no problems picking up and getting sucked into immediately. The story itself was so unique and different from most fairy tales, and even how the curses went and how the witches’ magi worked, all of it was so new and interesting. Every time something was tried to fix the original curse, it seemed something else popped in to either take its place, make it worse, or make it more understandable why the witch had made it in the first place.

And then there was the big reveal at the end, the big twist that while I got a tiny inkling of something like that being possible, but only from the clues the author laid down throughout the story, and bits of the synopsis. It was a really, really great twist. There were so many things in that end of the story that really do reflect the world we unfortunately still live in at times as women. And even how easy it is to convince others by things looking good on the surface, them refusing to see what is right under their own eyes at times because of being blinded by what someone wants them to see.

I downgraded on my blog rating to a 4.5 stars, because while I get the symbolism, I don’t like that they had to end up with never-ending daylight, because I love the night, and also that they got rid of the forest. Again, I get the symbolism, nothing to hide the dark things, but forests are good! So, those are my only, probably silly, complaints. Because this book is as beautiful and intricate as its cover!